


Department of Lost and Found: One Equation

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Related, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-01
Updated: 2008-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-11 22:45:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Right.  Well."  Rodney nods tightly, back half-turned to where Carson stands, held in stasis.  "That's done, then."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Department of Lost and Found: One Equation

"Right. Well." Rodney nods tightly, back half-turned to where Carson stands, held in stasis. "That's done, then." The control module in his hand is unnaturally heavy, cool and alien against his palm the way no Ancient technology has felt before. He glances at it, half expecting it to have morphed into something more sinister than a blocky amalgam of metal and tech, but it looks just the same, a remote control, a compact data pad, and it tells him nothing that makes a meaningful ounce of sense. "So." Looking up, he glances at Keller, avoids John's eye, looks down at his own shoes. "Back to work then?" His voice is chipper, falsely bright.

" _Rod_ ney," Sam says reproachfully, and Rodney doesn't have the chance to ask what exactly she's reproaching him for – John steps forward, lifts his chin just a fraction, and Sam isn't cowed but she inclines her head. Rodney blinks and stares at them both for a moment – he has no idea what's being said here in gestures instead of words, but it's more than he has the power to figure out right now, and he needs his laptop.

"Right. So I'll just," and he sets the data pad down on the life-signs console, rubs his hands together as he heads for the door.

John lets him pass, but Ronon's hand is warm and solid against his upper arm, catching him just before he can make his escape. Rodney turns his head, looks up into Ronon's face and sees a kindness there he has no idea how Ronon maintains after all these years, after this much loss. He swallows, nods tightly, and pulls away, letting out a thankful breath when the gloom of the hallway swallows him whole.

*****

The gentle hubbub of the lab doesn't quiet when he enters, although Zelenka does look up, pushing his glasses further up his nose. "Did everything go as it should?" he asks.

"Textbook," Rodney replies dryly, settling on a stool and booting up the program he'd been tweaking before the last round of emergencies pulled him away from the satisfaction of undiluted theory.

"Huh," Zelenka says softly. "I have never seen an Ancient book. Database, yes, indeed, but not. . ."

Rodney lets his fingers settle on the keys of his laptop. "It's just a phrase?" he says witheringly.

"Still, it is interesting to consider that they did not publish, print, commit to . . ."

"Yes, yes, absolutely fascinating," Rodney mumbles, and turns his attention to the code he's been crafting for months.

He expects to excavate comfort from his laptop, to find – along with a familiar ache in his shoulders and a soft, throbbing pain at the base of his spine – solace in the everyday alchemy of whiteboard and lab. This is, he knows, the surest path through any emotional minefield – to discipline himself to concentrate on the quantifiable and forget the unknown, to focus on figures and the elegant down-stroke of Pi inked on a page, to fill his brain with calculations until the grief that wears Elizabeth's face, speaks with Jeannie's teenage voice, reaches for him with Grodin's capable hands is contained again, driven back to the softer places inside him, vanquished by the deceptively gentle curve of infinity's razor-blade edge. But this time it doesn't work – the numbers surge at his command, but there's a needling loss trying to crawl up his spine, muddling his equations and stealing his insight. His simulations fail twice, three times, and by four he's baffled, angry and ashamed that he can't twist the lines of his programming into something that's reassuringly beautiful, a saving grace.

"Rodney."

He flinches – Zelenka's using his reasonable voice. " _What_?"

"Go home."

Rodney's stomach cramps, and he winces, rubs the heels of his hands against dry, itchy eyes. "I'm fine."

Zelenka steps closer and lowers his voice. "We both know this is not true."

Rodney drops his hands and blinks at him, at his annoyingly disheveled hair and crooked glasses. "What could you _begin_ to know about . . ."

Zelenka raises an eyebrow, apparently unperturbed. "I will ensure no one undertakes an inappropriate amount of stupidity without you here to yell at them. If you truly feel there is nothing wrong, perhaps you could simply take one of the sleeping pills Doctor Keller gave you two weeks ago and get some rest. This way you will not kill us, theoretically or otherwise, and I will not be forced to kill you."

Rodney eyes him incredulously. "Oh, _please_. As if you could – "

Zelenka tilts his head.

"Fine," Rodney sighs, rolling his eyes. "Fine! Since you're seemingly so content to live in a world _without_ any commitment to scientific advancement . . . "

"Exactly," Zelenka says, patiently. "You have found me out. I am a Luddite. I plan to begin living in a tent and subsisting solely on Tava beans before sundown. I simply need you out of the lab so that I can make my escape."

"Smash my machines and I will end you," Rodney says without any conviction.

"Yes, yes, absolutely." Zelenka steadies him as he stands. "We will see you tomorrow. Or perhaps the day after if you – "

Rodney throws him a look.

"Tomorrow, then."

Rodney ambles toward the door.

"But, Rodney?"

" _What?_ "

"Please remember – there is no emergency right now. This may be the time to – "

"Goodnight," Rodney says, enunciating everything with dismissive precision, and he leaves the lab without remembering his laptop is still on the bench.

*****

Rodney's quarters are cold, and he turns up the heat, lowers himself to the floor without processing what he's doing, sits with his back against his bed. It's cold and it's gray and everything feels still and silent and slightly removed from anything like reality. He tries to think in numbers again, in values multiplied by the power of X and fed into the machine of a set of brackets, but it's cold and his brain feels sluggish and there's a peculiar distance between his hands and anything they can feasibly do. Perhaps, he thinks, it's just his vantage point, knees raised, hands dangling between, ass set hard against the unforgiving tile. Perhaps the architecture of the ceiling and console by the door seem unfamiliar today because he never sits here, like this, so quiet – is never idle except when he's sleeping; is never cold like he feels the cold now.

And he realizes as he hears the ragged edge of someone's breath, hauled into lungs that are clogged with grief, that he's crying, that his face is damp, that his nose is running and he can't hold it in anymore – that Elizabeth's gone and dead because of his coding; that he'll never get back the years he didn't speak to Jeannie; that there are too many scientists crowding at Peter's shoulders, ghosts whose names he can't remember, there have been so many to die. And Carson – brought back, handed over to them, some fucked up gift from a galaxy that's cornering the market on new ways to throw a devastating curve ball, and taken again, trapped in stasis, held in a cold Rodney feels in his bones. He's sure he's retching numbers with every hitch of breathing – curious, how he can catalog the sensation, this impossible equation of losing control – fragments of vacuum fluctuation spilling over his lips, shards of angular frequencies, invisible and observable singularities torn and damaged pouring out of him, every weapon in his mathematical arsenal pooling in his lap, unable to help him anymore.

By the time the door chimes, he's silent again, head tipped back against the mattress, eyes dry, swollen and sore. He doesn't bother to ask whomever's outside to come in – there's no one he wants to see, and if it's John he'll override the security protocol anyway, so there's no point in disturbing this efficient lethargy. The door chimes again, and again, and again, and his radio crackles impotently on the bedside table. Rodney doesn't move, just blinks passively, watches the ceiling do nothing at all, and when John hustles into his quarters he doesn't even feign surprise.

"You ignoring us?" John asks, hovering a couple of feet into Rodney's room. The door slides closed behind him.

"Us?" Rodney asks, confused.

"Yeah, you know." John's voice is dripping with frustration. "Us. The people you work with."

"No."

John lets out a sharp, harried breath. "Then what the hell's with not answering your door?"

"Not on duty," Rodney replies evenly. "Felt like just . . . sitting here." He lets his gaze slide from ceiling to John, watches him swallow, vibrating with some emotion Rodney's pretty sure he knows.

John nods, begins to pace, picks up a bolt and screw from Rodney's desk, starts playing with them in his hand. "Nothing new yet."

"Hmm?"

"On Teyla."

Rodney closes his eyes for a second, but the sharp peak of his grief is spent – there's just an ache now, tunneling down through his body, and Teyla's absence is cradled by that space. "We'll find her."

"Well, I know that," John says petulantly. He throws down the screw on the desk, puts the bolt in his pocket. "Jesus, McKay."

Rodney looks at him. "Is this one of those times where you came to find me because you want to say something but you don't actually want to say something, so you're just going to pick a fight?" He tilts his head.

John chews on his bottom lip. "No."

"Okay." Rodney looks back at the ceiling.

"Maybe."

Rodney sighs. "Because I'm taking one night, if that's okay. Just one night – not that long in the grand scheme of things, even without factoring in the relative span of . . . but that's getting off topic, I'm just – I think I get one night. I think I get one night to stop pretending, and I know you're not comfortable with that, that your whole house of cards is built on – predicated on the idea that you can just keep . . . "

"Rodney?"

"But I can't, is the thing." Rodney rolls his head against the mattress, looks at John. "I . . . I put my friend into stasis and I . . . and Teyla's . . ." He frowns, trying to figure out the expression on John's face. "Just one night, I think, where I don't pretend." He watches John closely. "Are you cold? I'm cold."

John nods slowly. "Yeah." The nervous energy that was driving him seems to have dissipated – he shifts and sits down at Rodney's right side, pulls a blanket off the bed and throws it clumsily over Rodney's knees. "Been cold ever since Carson . . . you know."

Rodney's looking at the ceiling again, more aware of the warmth of John's arm against his own than the protection of the blanket. "We've lost too many people," he murmurs.

"Hey . . ."

"I know you think it too. You just – keep it wound up tight inside you until you . . . maybe that's why you're good with guns, because you channel it, send all those bullets out with names on or something. Maybe guns are your numbers – I have equations and codes and commands and things I can do with text and figures and sometimes, mostly, that's – are guns it?" He turns his head, watches John fiddle with the edge of the blanket.

"No."

"Do you have something?"

"Not really." John stretches out his legs, crosses them at the ankles. "I just – I don't . . . "

"You should have something."

"Yeah, well."

"John." And Rodney waits for him to turn his face, to meet his gaze before he leans in, before he kisses him, because this is his one night of not pretending, and he's wanted the shock of these lips beneath his for so long now he's forgotten when it started. John stutters, freezes, and everything's in stasis for a long, impossible minute before he makes a soft, feral noise and presses back, kisses Rodney instead of consenting to be kissed, coaxes Rodney's lips apart with the promise of his body twisting, pushing closer, and Rodney's hands twine through his hair, holding on, holding.

"Bed," John mutters, mouth dragging restlessly along the fault-line of Rodney's jaw. "Need . . ."

And Rodney goes with him, lets him drag him up, push him back across the mattress, doesn't care if this is sex or the two of them building amnesia out of teeth and shaking hands or – John settles above him, hips circling down, and god, okay, this is sex, this is sex, and he's so okay with that, god, "it's okay."

John shudders at that, turns his face away from Rodney's and sucks a bruise at the juncture of his neck that feels like grief again, not his own, and Rodney welcomes the sharp, damp pain of it, the ache that's rising up from inside him to dissipate, the cold that's replaced by racing heat even as their clothes fall away. He fills his hands with every part of John he can reach – splays his fingers over shoulder blades that shift and strain; curves his hands over the firm, muscled rise of John's ass, arches up from beneath, runs a fingernail over the small of John's back. John's thighs are firm and rough with hair where they drag against his own, his cock is hot, and they're clumsy, desperate, thrusting and trying to kiss even as the air is forced from their lungs, and when they come, it's not together, but it's close enough, blinding and necessary, something authentic amid their ruined breath.

Rodney suddenly fears the moment John'll let go – wraps his arms around him and holds him in place, wonders distantly why he isn't struggling. He'd imagined, when his thoughts had run to this kind of sweating, that John would reach for isolation again the moment he could – but John's rubbing his nose against Rodney's throat and his breathing isn't steady, even though it's slowed. "I think," Rodney whispers. "I think that I might . . . that you . . ."

John ducks his head as he reaches for the blanket that's on the floor, as he shakes it out over them and eases himself back into the space he's carved with the weight of his body, a permanent home scrabbled into the arc of Rodney's ribs. "Yeah. Yeah I . . . yeah."

And Rodney turns on his side, closes his eyes as he fits John against him better, more comfortably, a snick of key and lock that'll take some time to learn. The ache's still inside him, some zero-point energy or another crafted from folded loss, but numbers flow through his mind as John shifts closer, relaxes, goes heavy beside him, smelling familiar and old. "I think I might," Rodney breathes into John's hair. "I think."

And John traces infinity across the small of Rodney's back, a soothing figure-eight that's lost its razor bite.


End file.
